President Obama yesterday committed to reducing stocks of U.S. weapons-grade plutonium and last week signed an agreement that will lower the country’s deployed nuclear arsenals.

Obama’s “science czar,” John Holdren, has long petitioned for these moves at a magazine whose personnel were used for the benefit of Soviet propaganda in an attempt to disarm America, according to a former top intelligence official from the USSR.

The magazine’s founders were accused of providing vital nuclear secrets that helped the Soviets develop an atomic bomb.

The magazine, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, has been urging the U.S. to surrender its nuclear arsenal to international control.

The U.S. and Russia yesterday signed a deal reducing stocks of weapons-grade plutonium, officials in both nations said.

U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov will sign a protocol to a 2000 agreement on eliminating excess weapons-grade plutonium from defense programs, the State Department said.

U.S. officials have said each country is to dispose of 34 metric tons of weapons-grade plutonium by burning it in reactors.

Last week, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev and Obama signed the new Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty, or START, committing them to reducing their deployed nuclear arsenals.

The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, with Holdren on the board of directors from 1984 until recently, has long petitioned for the U.S. to reduce its nuclear stockpiles. According to Pavel Sudoplatov, a former major-general in Soviet intelligence, this kind of work by the magazine editors was for the benefit of the Soviet Union.

Holdren is assistant to the president for science and technology, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and co-chairman of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology.

The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists began publishing regularly in 1945, when it was founded by former physicists from the Manhattan Project, which developed the first atomic bomb.

Two of the magazine’s founding sponsors, Leo Szilard and Robert Oppenheimer, were accused of passing information from the Manhattan Project to the Soviets. Both were also key initiators of the Manhattan Project.

In 1994, Sudoplatov, a former major-general in Soviet intelligence, identified Szilard and Oppenheimer as key sources of crucial atomic information to the Soviet Union.

“The most vital information for developing the first Soviet atomic bomb came from scientists engaged in the Manhattan Project to build the American atomic bomb – Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi and Leo Szilard,” wrote Sudoplatov.

Sudoplatov wrote the Soviet Union “received reports on the progress of the Manhattan Project from Oppenheimer and his friends in oral form, through comments and asides, and from documents transferred through clandestine methods with their full knowledge that the information they were sharing would be passed on.”

Oppenheimer was accused in Senate hearings of bringing communists into the Manhattan Project. He brought his brother Frank and three former graduate students into the project, all of whom, according to Senate hearings, were well known to him to be “members of the Communist Party or closely associated with activities of the Communist Party.”

Oppenheimer admitted he knew by August 1943 that two of the scientists working under him were Communist Party members. Three of five scientists under Oppenheimer’s direct supervision were accused of leaking secret information about the atomic bomb to the Soviets.

On Oct. 25, 1945, Oppenheimer met with President Truman at the White House, urging him to surrender the U.S. nuclear monopoly to international control. Truman was outraged, reportedly telling Secretary of State Dean Acheson, “I don’t want to see that son-of-a-b*tch in this office ever again.”

Magazine used for ‘Soviet propaganda’

Oppenheimer and Szilard were stripped of their work in the Manhattan Project, but they continued to use the bulletin to petition for the U.S. to surrender its nuclear arsenal to international control.

“[Soviet politician and security chief Lavrentiy] Beria said we should think how to use Oppenheimer, Szilard and others around them in the peace campaign against nuclear armament. Disarmament and the inability to impose nuclear blackmail would deprive the United States of its advantage,” wrote Sudoplatov.

Sudoplatov said his spymasters knew the lobby efforts of the bulletin editors would be a “crucial factor in establishing the new world order after the war, and we took advantage of this.”

Another bulletin founding sponsor, Edward U. Condon, was mentioned by FBI director J. Edgar Hoover in a May 1947 letter as having contact with an alleged spy who had passed information to the Soviets from 1941 to 1944.

Holdren worked alongside communist sympathizers

When Holdren started work on the bulletin in 1984, communist and socialist sympathizers still occupied the magazine’s masthead.

The New Zeal blog notes the bulletin’s board of directors in 1984 included:

Board chairman Aaron Adler, who also served on the board of the Chicago Center for U.S./USSR Relations and Exchanges, alongside Larry McGurty of the Communist Party USA.

Adler was also a member of what New Zeal labels a Communist Party front, the Chicago Committee to Defend the Bill of Rights. He was also involved in a committee to celebrate the 100th birthday of Communist Party member Paul Robeson.

Bernard Weissbourd, a former Manhattan Project scientist who later served on the transition oversight committee for incoming Chicago Mayor Harold Washington, who was active in Communist Party fronts.

Weissbourds’ son, Robert M. Weissbourd, later served as chairman of the Obama for America Campaign Urban and Metropolitan Policy Committee and on the Obama Transition Housing and Urban Development Agency Review Team in 2008.

Ruth Adams, bulletin editor, who served in the 1960s on the Advisory Committee of the Hyde Park Community Peace Center. Other center members included lifelong communist front activist Robert Havighurst, communist activist and radical Trotskyist Sydney Lens and Quentin Young, an avowed communist who has advised Obama on health care.

Holdren in Cold War

WND first reported Holdren visited the Soviet Union during the Cold War as vice chairman of a group whose founder was accused of providing vital nuclear information that helped the Soviets build an atom bomb.
The original leaders of the group, the Federation of American Scientists, also served on the board of the bulletin magazine.

Just after President Reagan’s March 1983 “Star Wars” speech in which he proposed a missile-defense shield to protect the U.S., a group of Soviet academicians sent a letter to the U.S. scientific community asking about the feasibility of such a shield.

The only group that responded directly to the Soviet scientists was the Federation of American Scientists, or FAS, leading to an invitation to visit from Evgeny Velikov, director of the Soviet Kurchatov Institute of Science.

Physicist David W. Hafemeister relates in his book, “Physics and Nuclear Arms Today,” how he was part of the FAS delegation to the USSR along with Holdren, who at the time was a professor at the University of California at Berkeley.

The FAS is non-profit organization formed in 1945 by scientists from the Manhattan Project. The FAS has long petitioned for nuclear disarmament.

Szilard was a principal founder of the FAS. Founders of the FAS also were board members of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists.

Along with Szilard and Oppenheimer, WND found other FAS founders that served on the bulletin board, including nuclear physicists Eugene Rubinowitch, Hans Bethe and V. F. Weisskopf

Surrender to planetary regime

Holdren, meanwhile, has been a longtime climate-change alarmist who has advocated ideas such as enforcing limits to world population growth.

Holdren’s name was in the e-mails hacked from the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University in the U.K., which show that some climate researchers declined to share their data with fellow scientists, conspired to rig data and sought to keep researchers with dissenting views from publishing in leading scientific journals.

FrontPageMag.com noted Holdren has endorsed “surrender of sovereignty” to “a comprehensive Planetary Regime” that would control all the world’s resources, direct global redistribution of wealth, oversee the “de-development” of the West, control a world army and taxation regime, and enforce world population limits.

Holdren collaborated with conspiracy theorist Paul Ehrlich, author of “The Population Bomb,” in which it was proclaimed: “The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines – hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.”

WND previously reported Holdren also predicted 1 billion people will die in “carbon-dioxide-induced famines” in a coming new ice age by 2020.

Holdren based his prediction on a theory that human emissions of carbon dioxide would produce a climate catastrophe causing global cooling, with a consequent reduction in agricultural production resulting in widespread disaster.